Shayne Looper: Reverence is the air the spirit breathes

Monday

Jan 25, 2010 at 12:01 AMJan 25, 2010 at 5:35 AM

According to Oprah Winfrey, she was sitting in church one Sunday listening to her pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preaching. Something in his sermon disturbed her. He made a point of saying that the Lord is a “jealous God.”

Shayne Looper

According to Oprah Winfrey, she was sitting in church one Sunday listening to her pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preaching. Something in his sermon disturbed her. He made a point of saying that the Lord is a “jealous God.”

She was offended by the idea. How could a jealous God possibly merit her devotion? On that day, Oprah began a search for a spirituality that better suited her understanding of God and reality. She eventually left the church and stopped thinking of herself as a Christian.

Oprah is clearly an intelligent person, but if her decision to leave the faith was really founded, as she claims, on her rejection of a jealous God, it was based on faulty reasoning. The biblical writers would find her picture of God as a jealous and raging husband, who terrorizes and controls his wife unrecognizable. They thought of divine jealousy as a positive attribute.

Oprah made a common mistake. She read her own culturally conditioned ideas into the biblical text. The technical term for that is eisogesis. By imposing her own idea of jealousy on the Scripture passage, Oprah seriously misunderstood the text and the God it represents.

The phrase “the fear of the Lord” has been similarly misread. The biblical writers clearly thought it a good and laudable thing to fear God, yet many people have been put off by the idea, just as Oprah was by the idea of a jealous God. But do they really understand what it means?

When we think of fear, we think of the cringing anxiety that issues from an expectation of harm. But the biblical writers did not have this in mind. Our word “fear” hardly does justice to the richness of meaning behind the biblical concept. The closest we can come is “reverence.”

Reverence is the air the spirit breathes. It is a profound sense of the awe-fullness, the glory and otherness of God. Without it our spirit withers. The contemporary religious milieu offers little reverence but much entertainment. The mind is amused while the spirit suffocates.

Without reverence, the spirit cannot catch its breath, like a man with emphysema who cannot get enough oxygen, and whose heart pounds every time he walks across the floor. His head swims, he grows faint and must sit. Work is exhausting. Even the simplest tasks become daunting.

In our prayer lives, to jump into petition without first breathing the air of reverence causes us to grow faint. Even our petitions become weak, small and futile. We cannot “wrestle” in prayer, as Paul said Epaphras did for the Colossians. We can barely get out a few requests before we tire and seek rest in some mindless, soulless diversion.

Without reverence, we come to church and find we cannot worship. We can only be instructed, or perhaps even only entertained. Even if others are able to worship, we find the atmosphere too high or too rich for our blood. We say we want something more exciting when what we really want is something less demanding.

In our world we are constantly taking into our souls the toxins of rudeness, crudity and pride the way a smoker takes nicotine into his lungs. And it feels right and good. It stimulates us, gives us a sense of identity. But all the while it is destroying the soul’s ability to breathe reverence. Our spiritual lungs are probably already damaged .

But reverence — “the fear of God” — is a breath of fresh air. It strengthens our spiritual immune system, protecting us against the effects of other fears. Fear of others bring anxiety, but the fear God brings peace. Fear normally leads to uncertainty, but the fear of God gives direction. Fear usually causes us to focus on ourselves, but the fear of God helps us focus on others. Whereas our fear of others leads to hate, the fear of God ends ultimately in love.

The proverb summarizes it this way: “The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life."

Shayne Looper writes for The Daily Reporter in Coldwater, Mich. This column is the opinion of the writer and not of the newspaper.

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